“It is a bonnie bairn, as you say; God bless it!” which, as she afterward told him, was the first blessing ever breathed over the child.  “What is its name:”  he asked by-and-by, seeing she expected more notice taken of it.

“Alexander Cardross—­after my father.  My son is a born Scotsman too —­an Edinburg laddie.  We were coming home, as fast as we could, to Cairnforth.  He”—­glancing toward the bed—­“he wished it.”

Thus much thought for her, the dying man had shown.  He had been unwilling to leave his wife forlorn in a strange land.  He had come “fast as he could,” that her child might be born and her husband die at Cairnforth—­at least so the earl supposed, nor subsequently found any reason to doubt.  It was a good thing to hear then—­good to remember afterward.

For hours the earl sat in the broken chair, with Helen and her baby opposite, watching and waiting for the end.

It did not come till near morning.  Once during the night Captain Bruce opened his eyes and looked about him, but either his mind was confused, or—­who knows?—­made clearer by the approach of death, for he evinced no sign of surprise at the earl’s presence in the room.  He only fixed upon him a long, searching, inquiring gaze, which seemed to compel an answer.

Lord Cairnforth spoke: 

“Cousin, I am come to take home with me your wife and child.  Are you satisfied?”

“Yes.”

“I promise you they shall never want.  I will take care of them always.”

There was a faint assenting movement of the dying head, and then, just as Helen went out of the room with her baby, Captain Bruce followed her with his eyes, in which the earl thought was an expression almost approaching tenderness.  “Poor thing—­poor thing!  Her long trouble is over.”

These were the last words he ever said, for shortly afterward he again fell into a sleep, out of which he passed quietly and without pain into sleep eternal.  They looked at him, and he was still breathing; they looked at him a few minutes after, and he was, as Mr. Cardross would have expressed it, “away”—­far, far away—­in His safe keeping with whom abide the souls of both the righteous and the wicked, the living and the dead.

Let Him judge him, for no one else ever did.  No one ever spoke of him but as their dead can only be spoken of either to or by the widow and the fatherless.

Without much difficulty—­for, after her husband’s death, Helen’s strength suddenly collapsed, and she became perfectly passive in the earl’s hands and in those of Mrs. Campbell—­Lord Cairnforth learned all he required about the circumstances of the Bruce family.